Beauty for Breakfast...

09/07/2014

LET'S REBUILD THE HARLEM HOUSE THE WALKERS BUILT?

How adroit, for Vertner Tandy, Madame C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia Walker Robinson, to do just what whites would have maintained they were incapable of. Employing what a century ago was regarded as the epitome of "good taste", exercising disciplined restraint, they used Charlston's renowned Nathaniel Russell house and Boston buildings built from the 1790's through the early 1800's as the model for their hybrid Walker townhouse-salon, that combined home and business long before it was ever considered at Bergdorf-Goodman or Elizabeth Arden.

Ambition and opportunity were half of what had moved her. Her only child, Lelia was the other part of the equation. The woman who became famous as A'Lelia Walker always came first where her mother was concerned. Frequently she was cross about her extravagance, yet, repeatedly, Madame Walker indulged her child. She was also ambitious for Lelia, for whom she desired to provide all that she had missed, including Paris hats, travel abroad and an education. That rarest of rarities, a Negro heiress, her mother was right to fear that some would attempt to take advantage of her daughter. However, her daughter also made Madame Walker proud. Neither possessing the requisite fragility, fair skin, or delicate features to be regarded as a beauty in her day, tall and statuesquely handsome Lelia always made an impressive, even a striking appearance. Moreover, true intelligence and common sense underlay Lelia's impulsiveness and occasional self-indulgence. Always, not unlike Sportin Life in Porgey n' Bess, the bright lights and good times of the big city beckoned alluringly to Madame Walker's child. In 1913 she had bade her mother to relocate with her to the new Negro 'promised land' of Harlem, a quarter with as many dance halls, cabarets and salons as churches, hundreds! The women attending church and bars mightn't be the same women, but Lelia pointed out, that all hundred thousand wanted to get their hair done before they went there.

So off to Harlem they ventured. According to historian Christopher Gray, in 1913 and 1915 Madam Walker bought two old-style brownstones at 108 and 110 West 136th Street. In 1915 she filed plans to completely rebuild the two houses as one and give them a new front, in the same way that many midtown and East Side rowhouses were being reconstructed

Window in blind arch at the Nathaniel Russell house

On the second floor, the main level of Madame Walker's residence. drawings show a double-size drawing room stretching the full width of the building. Three "chambres" occupied the remainder of the second floor. A billiard room and other additional bedrooms were found on the third floor.

When the Walkers next decided to build a country house, neighbors were horrified, first seeing 'the dressed up Negresses with their comically aloof airs in a chauffeur-driven automobile' pull up. But her white lawyer had secured the deed for Villa Lewaro's acreage, fair and square!

Ultimately, devising a combination residence-spa-beauty salon-school for the Walkers, Vertner Tandy took his cue from the townhouse of Percy Rivington Pyne, II, Esquire. Bowing to the Federal style prevailing during the early republic, it is a picture of WASP decorum and rectitude. Planned by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1911, it stands on the north-west corner of Park Avenue, at 68th Street, serving as the Americas Society.

Madam C. J. Walker's business acumen was prodigious. Living large, projecting as fabulous an image and aura as she could afford, she appreciated that this was a shrewd advertising strategy. Her distinguished 108-110 West 136th Street beauty salon-residence was designed by black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy.

By combining her home and business in two converted brownstone houses, made into a single building, Tandy maximized the grandeur of both.

Once A'Lelia Walker moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 80 Edgecombe Avenue, she transformed her mother's grand abode into a deluxe catering hall, the storied Dark Tower, where the best parties were always the ones she gave.

The Reception Room of the Walker Beauty Parlor, College and Spa.

Two photographs staged to show styling, care and wig making techniques in the Walker'sLelia Beauty College manual.

In reality, the Walker's clients were groomed and styled in private, curtained booths. While awaiting an appointment, one could take tea or play a hand of cards.

Drawing room, Madame C. J. Walker residence

For bedrooms and other lesser interiors, architect Vertner Tandy economically retained the configuration and old-fashioned Victorian woodwork original to the two 1890's row houses combined to form the Walker townhouse-beauty salon. However, for this space and other formal reception rooms, every component was newly built.

A grand piano, an 18th-century French tapestry fragment and an allegorical statuette were among the elegant elements of decorators, Righter & Kolb's chic decor.

Madame Walker and her daughter so admired this depiction of Terpsichore, the muse of dance and chorus, that it was moved and given place of honor in Villa Lewaro's white and gold music room

Equipped with a Chickering piano, a phonograph and serviceable, comfortable tufted-leather seat-furniture, including a platform rocking chair, the Walker's living room was meant for relaxation.

Retaining Victorian mahogany wood work, complimented by richly colored walls, the Walker living room also prominently displayed a tapestry depicting a battle scene from African history

A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom

Although the old original mantelpiece and architraves were kept here, Righter & Kolb, much like Stanford White at the Ogden Mills' estate, made them 'modern', with cream colored paint, matching the painted Louis XVI-style furniture

A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured in A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom, later moved to the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece

Initially disdainful of Madame Walker, as he and many were, of all women seeking political influence, Washington's rebuffs provoked Walker's equivalent of Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman? speech. Learning in this way of Walker's wealth and charity, the most notable black man in America soon conceded that Madame Walker was surly the nation's foremost black woman.

Walker's retort on being discouraged from addressing the National Negro Business League Convention, over which Washington presided in 1912, might to have been etitled "And, Am I Not an Unqualified Success!?" It went in part,

“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations….I have built my own factory on my own ground...”

1928: The Dark Tower, by James Vanderzee

Already living at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue apartment by the mid-1920's, to better utilize the living space at 110 West 136th Street, A'Lelia Walker rented several rooms for private social and civic events, calling this enterprise, "The Walker Studio". At a dinner featuring spaghetti, for which she was acclaimed, Walker announced to assembled artists, who included Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurmon, and Richard Bruce Nugent, that she would inaugurate a gathering place for them, a club-tea shop. It was to be called the "Dark Tower", in reference to Countee Cullen's evocative poem. In due course a local sign painter emblazoned the drawing room walls with the Cullen poem, as well as Hughes' "The Weary Blues". Unfortunately, although a popular venue for parties hosted by the well-off, Harlem artists could neither afford the rent, nor, according to Nugent, even the price of refreshments.

Skyscraper bookcase, by Paul T. Frankl, first produced in 1924

A Viennese furniture designer and maker, an architect, painter, and writer, one of Walker's numerous acquaintances from Greenwich Village parties, Frankl contributed to the Dark Tower's decorative scheme. Both a variant of his well-known bookcase and the gold-stenciled light shade, represent his smart handiwork.

1926: A'Lelia Walker is shown in a cassock's uniform she purchased at Wanamaker's in New York, for a costume party at Webster Hall

Number 80 Edgecombe Avenue

Her mother ill, soon to die, A'Leia Walker had been about to remarry in 1919. She planned to move to a corner house she'd acquired for her new husband, Dr. Willey Wilson, at 138th Street on Strivers' Row. Even subsequent to her third failed marriage, A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy instead lived here, in a one bedroom walk-up apartment with her friend, driver and companion, Mayme White

Even Madame Walker's heiress daughter was adversely impacted by the Great Crash in 1929. Forthwith, 108-110 was leased to the city, for a much needed Harlem health clinic. A year later, it was sold outright. By 1947, the one-time home to the rollicking Dark Tower, was no more. It was replaced by a public library branch, ironically, named for A'Lelia Walker's friend, poet Countee Cullen.

How much, one dares to wonder, might it take to restore, on the outside, Vertner Tandy's elegant architecture of such rare refinement?